Online dating app Tinder is helping United States-based users know when it’s time to swipe right, allowing for deeper vetting.
Match Group, which owns Tinder, Match.com, Hinge, and several other dating services, announced on Monday that it is partnering with nonprofit background check platform Garbo to enable digital daters to vet their matches better.
“With Garbo, users can look up matches using their first and last name or first name and phone number, which are routine things that our users would know in the course of communicating with someone on a dating app,” a Match Group spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
The spokesperson added that “Match Group will not be providing any data to Garbo. All of the information used for a background check is either on that user’s external profile or voluntarily disclosed through conversation with their matches.”
In particular, Match Group mentioned informing users of any crimes related to violence and abuse as its aim. Garbo’s system does not include arrests related to drug possession and traffic violations, which Match Group said in a news release “have a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups.”
Garbo explained in a recent Medium post that it excludes drug possession charges, saying the organization is “acutely aware of systemic racial inequality in America and that the intimations of this are embedded in the criminal justice system.”
“More than 90% of all abusers are serial abusers — with the average rapist having 11-17 victims,” Garbo says on its website. “Yet these individuals are often let off the hook while others are heavily prosecuted for petty crimes against society.”
Match Group has committed a seven-figure financial contribution to help Garbo scale its integration with Tinder. The funding will be used to hire employees for engineering, product, and leadership roles. The engineering team will work specifically to build out Garbo’s capabilities in natural language processing and to build its artificial intelligence tools to filter out information about drug-related crimes.
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Match Group will begin testing Garbo on Tinder in the coming months and expects that the technology will be adopted on Tinder later this year, after which its other platforms will follow.
